good old gentoo.. all gone!

my first experience in linux brought to me by rdhat 7.0, few years back. i was using redhat quite extensively until it was branched into fedora rhel model. the first ever fedora used was a bitter experience. the second and third release didn't improve by the means of stability.

i made a very good decision at the same time, switching to gentoo in 2004. the initial installation was painful, true. but it outweighs the system you build by yourself in a numerous ways. using gentoo i managed to get :
- improvides performance
- less memory consumption
- didn't install any component, i didn't want to use/install
- gained a very good control over the installed bits

the honeymoon i had with gentoo ended around late 2006. i was using fedora since then. however, i tried to install gentoo on one of my boxes to have a slimmed down version. installing from the scratch, from stage 3.

i managed to get the base installation up and running around an hours time. what was installed was really light and i was delighted with what i had built. this leads me to install the x-sever a desktop manager + desktop environment.

i picked gnome as usual ahead of buggy kde4. i was installing 150 packages, which too more than a couple hours. then when it reached the 147 package .. it had to say the following .. after spending hours on this installation:

indicating that the good old gentoo i know a few years back had already gone. this is not the first time that this happened. in recent times i tried installing gentoo more than a few times... all that i realised was .. the present gentoo isn't good as what we used before .. there are so many broken packages .. with a number of bugs .. beyond what's acceptable.. proving that fedora to be the latest pure open source leader in the arena


!!! Please attach the following file when seeking support:
!!! /var/tmp/portage/gnome-base/gnome-session-2.20.3/work/gnome-session-2.20.3/config.log
*
* ERROR: gnome-base/gnome-session-2.20.3 failed.
* Call stack:
* ebuild.sh, line 49: Called src_compile
* environment, line 2581: Called gnome2_src_compile
* environment, line 1966: Called gnome2_src_configure
* environment, line 1980: Called econf 'src_compile' 'src_compile' '--enable-ipv6'
* ebuild.sh, line 513: Called die
* The specific snippet of code:
* die "econf failed"
* The die message:
* econf failed
*
* If you need support, post the topmost build error, and the call stack if relevant.
* A complete build log is located at '/var/tmp/portage/gnome-base/gnome-session-2.20.3/temp/build.log'.
* The ebuild environment file is located at '/var/tmp/portage/gnome-base/gnome-session-2.20.3/temp/environment'.
*

* Messages for package gnome-base/gnome-session-2.20.3:

*
* ERROR: gnome-base/gnome-session-2.20.3 failed.
* Call stack:
* ebuild.sh, line 49: Called src_compile
* environment, line 2581: Called gnome2_src_compile
* environment, line 1966: Called gnome2_src_configure
* environment, line 1980: Called econf 'src_compile' 'src_compile' '--enable-ipv6'
* ebuild.sh, line 513: Called die
* The specific snippet of code:
* die "econf failed"
* The die message:
* econf failed
*
* If you need support, post the topmost build error, and the call stack if relevant.
* A complete build log is located at '/var/tmp/portage/gnome-base/gnome-session-2.20.3/temp/build.log'.
* The ebuild environment file is located at '/var/tmp/portage/gnome-base/gnome-session-2.20.3/temp/environment'.
*
* GNU info directory index is up-to-date.